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Punk legends, Descendents, and Folk-Rock's finest, Frank Turner, have taken to the road and brought along Canada's punk collective, NOBRO. The tour has been weaving its way around the United States for the past 3 weeks and finally made its way to the West Coast. I was fortunate enough to make it out for their 1 of 2 night stint in Disney's land at the House of Blues in Anaheim. 

NOBRO kicked off the night with a boisterous set of ripping garage-punk numbers. Vocalist Kathryn McCaughey hopped back and forth between bass duties and wooing the crowd with a vigorous display of showmanship. Guitarists Josee Caron and Karolane Carbonneau ripped through the numbers' swift chord changes, interspersed with subtle strident licks across the fretboard. By the end, the crowd was wide awake and warmed up. Ready for the rest of the night to unfold. 

Frank Turner and his band of sleeping souls took to the stage ready to fill the room with blaring folk-punk and positivity for his 3127th show, kicking off the set with Turner's ode to Rock 'n' Roll, "I Still Believe," followed by his call to action in "Try This at Home." The Sleeping Souls were as tight-knit as ever, with Ben Lloyd swinging his axe around but never missing a note, and bassist Tarrant Anderson striding around keeping the rhythm with gusto. 

Turner has a knack for making everyone feel full of life, youthful, and joyful. During his declarative "I Don't Want to Be In Your Gang," he turned a hardcore or metal show's "wall of death" into a "wall of hugs," suggesting that rather than closing the wall with violence, the crowd close the wall with kindness and hug the people on opposite ends. In the middle of a solo-acoustic portion of his set, he ran through his sentimental "Be More Kind" dedicated to Minneapolis before a cover of NOFX's "Bob" which included a surprise appearance by the front man himself, Fat Mike, on harmonica. 

By the end of the set, Frank had thrown down his guitar and let himself fly free across the stage and into the crowd for Tape Deck Heart's "Four Simple Words." He spent most of the night repeatedly asking if he was making friends, and there was no doubt he was now everyone's best friend. Be sure to head to Dallas when Frank holds his 9th annual Lost Evenings Fest! The line-up just got announced, and it's killer!

It was time for the legendary punk outfit, Descendents. Before even playing a note, Milo was already firing off jokes about Mickey Mouse before segueing into "Everything Sucks." The crowd erupted when they went into punk earworm, "Hope." Despite the band becoming more and more melodic, they still don't stray away from their short bursts of comedy, throwing in tracks like "I Like Food" and  "Weinerschnitzel" combined with "No, ALL!"

Milo repeatedly went out to the barricade to sing with the crowd, including with a "silly girl" for their appropriately titled track from I Don't Want to Grow Up. On another occasion, he grabbed a papier-mache Milo standing on the toilet from Everything Sucks and set it on the stage. 

The band continued to play through songs spanning their entire discography, including "Coolidge" and "I'm the One" from their earlier years, to newer tracks like "On Paper" from Hypercaffium Spazzinate and "Nightage" from 9th & Walnut. Towards the end, during fan favorite "Bikeage," their tour bus driver stepped in to take over drumming duties, giving Bill Stevenson the opportunity to step up to the mic and catch the bodies flying over the barricade to get to Milo. 

When the band came back for their encore, fans were yelling for "one more song," but were gifted with four. They closed out the night with the Enjoy track, "Get the Time." Descendents built a career on having fun and not wanting to grow up and get old. They made it clear that they still have no intention of doing so. Stephen Egerton plays as fast and aggressively as ever. Milo is still meandering around on stage and cracking jokes. Descendents will be joining Social Distortion on a full US tour beginning late August. Don't miss an opportunity to catch these punk veterans. They never disappoint. 

Ed Sheeran
Accor Stadium
Sydney, Australia
14 February 2026

On Valentine’s night, seventy thousand people assembled at Accor Stadium to watch Ed Sheeran test a quiet paradox: whether a space designed for mass spectacle can be persuaded to behave like a private exchange.

The answer, as it turns out, lies less in scale than in structure.

Sheeran’s performance logic is architectural rather than theatrical. Songs do not arrive fully formed; they accumulate. A rhythm tapped into the guitar body becomes foundation. Chords settle over it. Harmonies are introduced with the patience of someone stacking beams rather than chasing applause. Within minutes the solitary figure onstage produces something that reads as collective. Many musicians employ loop systems. Few have reorganised the economics of stadium touring around one.

His entrance refuses grandeur. He appears almost incidentally - a small, copper-haired figure on a circular platform dwarfed by the infrastructure meant to amplify him. The brief uncertainty in the crowd, that fractional pause before recognition, feels intentional. The entire evening rests on that tension: immensity presented as modesty, machinery framed as intimacy.

The production itself is meticulous. Screens fracture and multiply his image. Flame jets punctuate choruses with algorithmic precision. Moving structures slide into place with the assurance of well-funded engineering. One imagines Guy Debord would have recognised the completeness of the spectacle immediately. And yet the spectacle never fully claims the room.

Attention keeps drifting back to the pedals.

There is something quietly persuasive about watching a song assembled in real time. The process does not diminish the effect; it sharpens it. Sheeran’s gift is not virtuosity so much as intelligibility.

He exposes the scaffolding, and in doing so transforms construction into performance. The audience is not merely witnessing songs; it is witnessing the act of making them, which confers a sense of shared authorship, however illusory.

What prevents the sentiment from curdling is his calibration. He understands how much emotional directness a crowd can absorb before it tips into excess. Ballads arrive at precisely judged intervals. Phones rise in synchrony until the audience itself becomes a luminous extension of the stage design. It is sincerity shaped with the care of choreography - not manufactured, exactly, but undeniably managed.

A moment in which the crowd is instructed to trigger their camera flashes during a lyric about presence encapsulates the method. The contradiction is obvious, acknowledged, even gently mocked. Rather than undermining the sentiment, the self-awareness seems to legitimise it. The performance does not deny its own artifice; it incorporates it.

When additional musicians briefly join him mid-set, the sonic density increases but the clarity recedes. The architecture softens. The loop system reveals itself not as embellishment but as spine. Without it, the show becomes merely large; with it, it remains precise.

“I See Fire” provides the evening’s closest brush with myth. Flame columns rise in synchrony with the melody, and for a moment the scale feels earned rather than imposed. The song carries its theatrics because its structure is strong enough to support them - an increasingly rare quality in arena pop.

By the closing stretch, Sheeran registers less as performer than as conduit: a stabilising route through which familiar emotions travel with unusual efficiency. He is not reimagining pop’s emotional vocabulary. He is refining its transmission.

The dispersal afterwards unfolds with the muted choreography of shared experience dissolving into private memory. Children asleep in merchandise hoodies. Couples speaking softly, as if leaving a ceremony. Someone humming a chorus as though it belonged uniquely to them. In a sense, that is the product being offered.
Strip away the pyrotechnics, the screens, the mechanical bridges, and the proposition is almost austere: one guitar, one recursive device, one performer repeating the same emotional exchange until repetition acquires the gravity of ritual.

He has not reinvented busking.
He has simply extended its radius until the gesture fills a stadium.

And the loop, patient and exacting, continues to turn.

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
The Domain
23 January 2026
Sydney, Australia

On a humid January night at Sydney’s Domain, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds demonstrated something increasingly rare in contemporary touring culture: not merely longevity, but artistic liquidity. Over two and a half hours, the band unfolded a set that refused the logic of retrospection, instead behaving like a living archive - porous, unstable, and responsive. This was not a career survey. It was an argument for continuation.

Outdoor shows often dilute intensity, dispersing attention across grass, sky and distance. Over the past decade, Cave has been quietly recalibrating how closeness functions in rooms designed for thousands. What unfolded at the Domain felt closer to a ritual assembly than a spectacle, driven by direct address, sustained eye contact, and Cave’s instinctive understanding that proximity is psychological before it is physical. His movements - prowling, stooping, clasping hands at the barricade - echoed the physical vocabulary he has refined since the Push the Sky Away era, where vulnerability replaced confrontation as the primary mode of engagement.

Opening with “Frogs” from 2024’s Wild God was both a statement of intent and an act of confidence. The song’s choral ascension, powered by backing vocalists Wendi Rose, Janet Ramus, Miça Townsend and T Jae Cole, immediately positioned the evening within the album’s spiritual register. Wild God is arguably Cave’s most openly devotional work since The Boatman’s Call, though its faith is restless, interrogative, and plural. Live, its songs function less as declarations than as invocations - open-ended, searching, and insistently communal.

That eight tracks from Wild God appeared in the set is significant. For a band entering its fifth decade, this degree of reliance on new material signals more than relevance; it suggests trust. Cave has often spoken about the audience as collaborators rather than consumers, and the Domain performance bore this out. Songs such as “Song of the Lake” and “Cinnamon Horses” were received not as interruptions to the canon, but as necessary extensions of it. The effect was cumulative: Wild God did not sit alongside the catalogue so much as reframe it.

This reframing was especially apparent when older material surfaced. Early works like “From Her to Eternity” and “Tupelo” retained their feral intensity, but their context has shifted. Once expressions of gothic extremity, they now read as foundational myths - origin stories that still pulse, but with the distance of time lending them clarity rather than menace. “Tupelo”, in particular, emerged as operatic tribal blues, its apocalyptic imagery amplified by the open sky, as if calling upward rather than inward.

Cave’s performance style continues to oscillate between preacher, provocateur and self-satirist. His offhand humour functions as a pressure valve, puncturing solemnity without diminishing emotional stakes. This self-awareness is crucial. Cave understands that sincerity, left unchecked, curdles into dogma.

“O Children” itself became one of the evening’s emotional fulcrums, with Warren Ellis emerging from his seat to deliver a violin solo that felt less like embellishment than communion. Ellis remains the band’s alchemical agent, bridging Cave’s increasingly expansive creative universe with the Bad Seeds’ core identity. His presence also underscored the porous boundaries between projects, particularly with the inclusion of “White Elephant” and “Carnage” from the Cave–Ellis collaboration Carnage. These songs did not feel imported; they felt inevitable.

Musically, the Bad Seeds continue to operate as a finely calibrated organism. George Vjestica’s guitar work was precise yet unrestrained, carving through the controlled chaos of “Jubilee Street” and “From Her to Eternity”. Carly Paradis’ keyboards provided a textural counterbalance, while Larry Mullins and Jim Sclavunos delivered percussive patterns that felt both martial and elastic. Colin Greenwood, still deputising for Martyn P. Casey, brought a measured authority to the low end, anchoring the band without drawing focus.

Visually, the production resisted excess. The band appeared in stark black, white and sepia on the giant screens, reinforcing the sense of collective labour rather than individual dominance. This aesthetic restraint mirrored the music’s emotional architecture: even at its most explosive, the show never tipped into bombast.
Later-era songs such as “Bright Horses”, “Skeleton Tree” and “Long Dark Night” carried a different weight entirely. These works, shaped by grief and its aftermath, have gradually shed their initial fragility to become something more resilient. Live, they function as quiet acts of defiance - proof that reflection can coexist with momentum. The crowd’s attentiveness during these moments was striking, the silence as active as the applause.

The encores unfolded with a generosity that felt unforced. “Wide Lovely Eyes”, played for the first time in 13 years and noted as a favourite of Cave’s wife Suzie Bick, was tender without sentimentality. “Papa Won’t Leave You, Henry” reintroduced swagger and threat, while “The Weeping Song” reaffirmed the band’s enduring fascination with biblical cadence and moral ambiguity. Cave’s final, solitary turn at the piano for “Into My Arms” stripped everything back to essence. No irony, no adornment - just a song that has outlived its moment to become something closer to a secular hymn.

Earlier in the evening, Aldous Harding’s support set - austere, idiosyncratic, and quietly confrontational - established a tonal throughline rather than a contrast. Her presence also gestured toward the trans-Tasman cultural currents that have long sustained the Bad Seeds’ audience, a lineage that will continue with the band’s forthcoming Wellington performances as part of the Aotearoa New Zealand Festival of the Arts 2026.

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds have spent over forty years resisting the embalming tendencies of legacy. What emerged most starkly at the Sydney Domain was an ethical insistence - that performance is only justified while the work remains animate. As Cave drifted offstage and into the night, leaving the piano behind, the feeling was not one of closure, but of celebration.

The less I say about 2025 the better.

Well, except to say that Scene Point Blank's 2025 Year End coverage is in development so, actually, I'll be talking about the year a lot.

Search/Play/Repeat is a sporadic playlist feature that's just about sharing music though, instead of hitting some topical theme.

The following half-hour of mostly punk music is a mix of stuff I've been digging, stuff that showed up in my inbox, and stuff off my basement CD shelf.

To quote Op Ivy, here we go again.

The Mars Volta just wrapped up their US tour in support of their new album, Lucro Sucio; Los Ojos del Vacio, and on their run, they brought their show to the Riverside Municipal Auditorium. It was Black Friday and the holidays were in full effect around downtown Riverside where the venue sits, as the city celebrates its Festival of Lights. Concertgoers were among the many roaming around downtown. Traffic made it difficult to find parking in time for the first opener Feliz Y Dada. I wandered in just in time to catch the uniquely costumed Latin artists finishing up their set.

Next up was Kiani Medina. The vocalist was accompanied by her brother Javius to serve as her multi-instrumentalist backbone. They performed a short set, but it was packed with beautiful vocal melodies that were soaring through the room while Javius maintained the rhythm.

Despite being a long-time fan of The Mars Volta, this was my first time catching them live. I went in with expectations based on past videos and second-hand accounts, but I was not prepared for the extravagant show they put on. Cedric kicked off the night with the a capella opener, "Fin," from the new album. The setlist would go on to consist of the entire new album played front-to-back. Fans of the old material were going to be out of luck, but The Mars Volta made it clear that it wasn't about playing a set of hits or fan-favorites. It was about celebrating the power of music through an experience that transcends a traditional live show.

With Cedric stationed in the middle of the stage with nothing but a blue light shining on him, he let his airy vocals entrance the audience before the rest of the band joined in on "Reina tormenta." A welcome addition to the live performance was Le Butcherettes' Teri Gender Bender. She shares the vocal duties with Cedric while also offering her form of interpretive dance.

Throughout the night, the band would go into a jam and improvise. Moments to let themselves go and feel free with Omar showing off his fancy fretwork. The crowd welcomed the sensory overload and allowed the music to take over. Before leading into "Morgana," Cedric let his voice ascend and harmonize with the ambiance that surrounded him. The set reached its crescendo in "Cue the Sun (Reprise)" as the band threw everything they had at the audience. After finishing their nonstop playthrough of Lucro Sucio; Los Ojos del Vacio, Cedric took a moment to address the crowd by thanking them for being so accepting of the openers and for their attention. The band then said goodnight and walked off. It was one of the more mesmerizing shows I've seen this year.